Third Act
by northernexposure
Summary: Except that then Beth was standing there, across the Grid, drenched in blood. Rivers of it, oceans…   WARNING: CHARACTER DEATHS. SPOILERS FOR 9.1-4 What I fear for the end of the season. Don't read if you want a happy ending.


**Third Act**

A/N: This is horrible, tragic and angsty, because I am terrified that this is what's coming, and I also haven't slept for days. Don't read if you're looking for a happy ending.

* * *

_I will die alone, and be left there._

_Well I guess I'll just go home,_

_Oh God knows where._

_Because death is just so full _

_and mine so small._

_I'm scared of what's behind _

_and what's before._

_After The Storm_ – Mumford and Sons

* * *

When he thinks about it now, he can't distinguish time passing. It feels, simultaneously, as if the whole episode took only minutes, but also a lifetime. And really, both were true.

Harry doesn't go up to the rooftop any more. There doesn't seem any point: the peace he used to find there is gone, because she is gone, and this time there is no bringing her back.

There is no peace. Not there, not anywhere. There is only the whirlwind discovery of what Lucas really was, and then, the loss. Harry blinks, and the play starts over again. That's how he's come to think of their life together: a tragedy in three acts. The first was the period in which he first fell in love with her, before she was forced to flee. The second was when she returned, and they coped – or tried to – with the decisions he had made. And the third was after his proposal.

He'd thought things were becoming easier between them. He knows he wasn't imagining it: they were. He'd been persistent, even after her refusal. Maybe too persistent, but he hadn't been able to help it, and it hadn't been in a hearts-and-flowers way. A careful sentence, here or there, when the larger situation had seemed to mirror their slow, sad dance. And gradually, she had responded. Ruth had always understood him better than any one else, and she'd seen through the spikes he'd put out as protection. She'd begun to see _him_, the real him. And, fool that he was, he'd begun to hope anew.

But then-

Then came Lucas, or John, and a treachery too big to ignore, unravelling quickly one quiet autumn day, when they had been quietly going about the business of protecting others. A standoff, brief but noisy. A showdown. A defeat, for both Lucas and Harry.

And he would have been able to deal with that. Really, he would.

Except that then Beth was standing there, across the Grid, drenched in blood. Rivers of it, _oceans_… but she was on her feet, whole, so it couldn't be hers, and suddenly he was looking around, for who was missing, and Ruth's desk was empty, and he couldn't quite remember the last time…

'Where's Ruth?' he heard himself ask, from a very distant, very cold place.

"Harry," Beth's voice was crushed glass, her face a carnival of horror and despair. 'I think she found out. I think he tried to stop her telling you…'

There was blankness, a loss of time and thought. And then he was running.

The absurd thing is that he can remember everything about his journey to the file store with the utmost clarity. The sound of his shoes, beating out his quick steps, his breathing, the rapid, unhappy thud of his heart. He can see the walls, too, how they changed from efficient silver-grey to stark, functional reinforced concrete. Their uneven finish, the cracks in their edges. The steel studs that held them together.

She was slumped against the wall, half-sitting, half-lying, hands held tight over her stomach, eyes closed. He remembers the white translucence of her fingers, against the scarlet of the blood. It pumped between them, monstrous in its displacement.

He can't remember if he made a sound. He thinks he probably did. The next thing he recalls is his hand over hers, putting added pressure on the wound, though rationally, he knew. In the part of his mind that was still capable of a modicum of sensibility, he knew that it was already too late. That a gallon of blood couldn't make up for what she had already lost, the trauma of how she had lost it.

Her hands were cold, and for a moment, he thought she'd already gone. But then her eyelids fluttered open, her grey eyes clouded and indistinct. She frowned, trying to focus. Her fingers reached out. The sound of her nails fumbling against the shirt fabric at his chest is so loud in his memory that it is like screaming.

"H-Harry…" she whispered. "I-"

"Don't," he said. He'd placed his free hand over hers, trying to warm her fingers in his. "Paramedics – on their way."

A smile ghosted a curve against her lips as her eyes floated shut again. "Too late," she breathed, "Too late. I'm sorry."

"Stay," he told her, like an order, as if she could obey him if she wanted to. "Ruth, don't-"

He was transfixed the movements of her face. She struggled to open her eyes, trying to find him in the gloom rapidly descending around her. "H-harry," she managed, "there's something… something… tell you. I should have… years ago."

He remembers the heat of his tears as her voice faded. He gathered her up in his left arm, his right hand still trying to stem the tide of her ebbing life. Her lips moved against his ear: a butterfly, breathing its last under glass.

"I love you," she said, with greater lucidity than he would have thought possible. "Always… always did."

He wanted to kiss her, felt he should, knew it was their last chance. But blood was tricking from her mouth, the wet rattle in her chest too loud, too painful.

"My life," he told her, instead. "My… _life._"

He still doesn't know exactly when Ruth died. He was holding her too close, folded against him like a letter he wanted to read, over and over again. But when the paramedics arrived, the blood had stopped pumping into his hand. She was limp when they persuaded him to give her up.

He remembers standing there, impotent, as they covered her face. The blanket was pale blue, knitted in neat, machined squares, like a baby's comforter.

He remembers shaking his hand because something was on it, and then seeing that it was her blood.

* * *

Lucas – John - knew that he was looking Death in the face when Harry came to visit. He nodded, resigned, perhaps relieved. Harry didn't care.

"I am sorry, Harry," he said in that soft voice that melted hearts before it punctured them. "Truly. Ruth was-"

Harry snapped his neck cleanly, but with hate. He watched the light seep from those eyes into whatever afterlife was truth among the lies.

* * *

Three people came to her funeral. For most people that mattered, she was already dead. Or else they were.

Harry didn't give a eulogy.

It would have been one long scream.

[END]


End file.
